Debbie Custance is a lecturer at Goldsmiths College,
Department of Psychology, London. She coauthored a study titled,
'Empathic-like responding by domestic dogs to distress in
humans: An exploratory study'.
The study tested how dogs respond to someone pretending
to cry and be in distress. The majority of dogs came over to the
person crying in a way that seemed to express empathic
concern. "When the stranger pretended to cry,
rather than approaching their usual source of comfort, their owner, dogs
sniffed, nuzzled and licked the stranger instead. The
dogs’ pattern of response was behaviorally consistent with an expression
of empathic concern..."
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- Study: Empathic-like responding by domestic dogs
to distress in humans: An exploratory study "Empathy covers a range of phenomena from cognitive
empathy involving metarepresentation to emotional contagion stemming
from automatically triggered reflexes. An experimental protocol first
used with human infants was adapted to investigate empathy in domestic
dogs. Dogs oriented toward their owner or a stranger more often when the
person was pretending to cry than when they were talking or humming.
Observers, unaware of experimental hypotheses and the condition under
which dogs were responding, more often categorized dogs’ approaches as
submissive as opposed to alert, playful or calm during the crying
condition. When the stranger pretended to cry, rather than approaching
their usual source of comfort, their owner, dogs sniffed, nuzzled and
licked the stranger instead. The dogs’ pattern of response was
behaviorally consistent with an expression of empathic concern, but is
most parsimoniously interpreted as emotional contagion coupled with a
previous learning history in which they have been rewarded for
approaching distressed human companions."
Picture this. You are taking your dog for a typical
neighborhood walk. All of a sudden, you trip over some uneven concrete
on the pavement and fall flat on your face, twisting your ankle and
remain lying there. Your dog instantly comes over to you and starts
whimpering. In your pain, you glance up and he starts licking you.
at long-held owner beliefs, a study suggests that dogs comforted
crying strangers in ways similar to human infants....
In the study, both Mayer and the dog's owner alternately cried and
hummed "Mary Had A Little Lamb", for 20 seconds in front of the dogs.
Similar experiments have shown infants expressing empathy towards
strangers under these conditions. Three observers were asked to score
films of the dog's reactions to the crying, humming and talking by
Mayer and the owners. "Four emotional states in dogs were considered:
submissive, calm, playful and alert," says the study.
- Canine comfort: Does your dog know when you're
In a study published online May 30 in the journal Animal
Cognition, University of London researchers found that dogs were more
likely to approach a crying person than someone who was humming or
talking, and that they normally responded to weeping with submissive
behaviors. The results are what you might expect if dogs understand our
pain, the researchers wrote, but it's not proof that they do.
Recent science suggests that dogs
may have more to contribute during hard and emotional times than
previously thought. In understanding the science behind human capacity
for empathy, it's not uncommon to turn to the animal kingdom for
additional evidence. It's been widely accepted that several animal
species -- primates, most notably -- exhibit prosocial tendencies. While
primates are our close evolutionary cousins, dogs are our closer
companions. What does man's best friend tell us about the science of
Study: Dogs Show Natural Desire to Comfort Human Companions
According to a recent study by Deborah Custance and Jennifer Mayer of
Goldsmiths College in London, dogs are good for us in more ways than we
might have imagined. Not only do they have a desire to please – they
also want us to be happy. According to the study, published in the in
the journal of Animal Cognition: Empathy covers a range of phenomena
from cognitive empathy involving metarepresentation to emotional
contagion stemming from automatically triggered reflexes. An
experimental protocol first used with human infants was adapted to
investigate empathy in domestic dogs
The case for dog-gone empathy "As a live-in companion of four Golden Retrievers over the last
twenty-five years, I don’t need to be convinced how emotionally
sensitive and empathically supportive dogs are when people around them
are in distress. When you’re down, few things could be more comforting
than a cold nuzzle from a warm Golden.Yet science quite properly discounts anecdotes, and all of the tales I
could produce would not add up to empirical evidence. For that, you need
a real experiment."